As long anticipated, Twitter is going public. It almost goes without saying that the social network broke the news on Twitter. Its announcement came in five characters under the microblogging site’s 140-character cutoff:

The offering is expected to be the tech world’s largest since Facebook went public in May 2012. Analysts valued Twitter at $10 billion earlier this year, and it may be worth a little more than that today. But as my colleague Matt Yglesias points out, the fact that it is filing confidentially implies that its annual revenues have not yet reached $1 billion. Following the lead of Facebook and other Internet companies whose fortunes depend on an enormous user base, Twitter has been cautious about turning its service into a money-maker so far, with ads few and far between on the site. So how does it make money, and why might it be worth so much?

Like Facebook, Twitter makes its money primarily by selling ads, which gain a lot of their value from the advertiser’s ability to target specific groups of users. Twitter’s disadvantage relative to Facebook is scale: It has on the order of 200 million users, while Facebook has some 1.15 billion. But its advantage lies in timeliness and topicality. People check Facebook casually, when time allows. Twitter users tend to use Twitter quite actively, and in conjunction with specific events, like TV shows, rallies, concerts, and breaking news. So advertisers can craft ads tailored not only to a Twitter user’s general tastes and demographic profile, but to what that user is doing at the very moment they see the ad.

The fact that the company broke its own IPO news via Twitter—and saw the news retweeted by thousands of people within minutes—underscores the company’s growing role as a global source of breaking news and instant analysis. It is in some ways the CNN of the Internet—the key difference being that it costs CNN an awful lot of money to produce its content, whereas Twitter gets it all for free from users. A disproportionate share of those users are, in fact, paid journalists for other companies, including CNN. They use the platform enthusiastically, bordering on addictively, as a way to build their personal brands and draw readers to their own sites. The result is that Twitter today is valued at some $10 billion, more than five times as much as the New York Times*—and it has the potential to become more valuable still.

Finally, Twitter is poised to be a big player in the fast-growing realm of mobile advertising. Just three days ago it splashed a reported $350 million to buy MoPub, the world’s largest mobile ad exchange, which allows advertisers to target users on their mobile devices. That might sound mundane, but in a blog post on Tuesday, former Facebooker Antonio Garcia argued that it actually makes Twitter “the most interesting company in advertising right now.” That’s quite an assertion, coming from the man who built Facebook’s own ad exchange. His full post is worth a read if you’re into this sort of thing, but in short, MoPub will give Twitter a platform through which to sell mobile ads that target users based on data that Twitter has collected from them on their desktop computers. That’s big, because the relatively sparse data available on users’ mobile phones has made such targeting difficult in the past.

In short, Twitter doesn’t make piles of money today, but it has the potential to become a much bigger player in the years to come, especially as people continue to do more of their social networking, news-reading, and shopping on their phones. For further background on the company’s evolution and prospects as a business, check out Joe Hagan’s comprehensive New York Magazine piece. It was written nearly two years ago, which translates to ages in Twitter years, but a lot of its predictions have been borne out in the time since.

*Correction, Sept. 12, 9:35 p.m.: This post originally stated that Twitter has been valued at about the same amount of money as the New York Times. Its valuation is more than five times the Times‘ market capitalization.

Social engagement is both a science and an art. I analyzed data from over 100 companies of all sizes to determine the best ways to maximize social engagement. The findings are telling; for instance: did you know that posting to three or more channels increases engagement by over 40%? Or that posts on Saturday received more engagement than any other day of the week?

Check out the infographic below for more insight into the science of engagement, and pick up my book Stand Out Social Marketing: How to Rise Above the Noise, Differentiate Your Brand, and Build an Outstanding Online Presence for a complete guide to maximizing your social media returns.

Social media means business – for brands of all shapes and sizes, in almost every industry and every country around the globe.

In fact, not having a well-defined and professionally-managed presence in one or more social media channels can leave the modern business looking out-of-touch and amateurish. Moreover, these platforms have consistently proven themselves to be powerful tools in the strategic arsenal of marketing and sales departments, and many firms that have been dismissive or short-sighted about the benefits of social media have suffered the consequences.

This infographic takes a closer look at some key statistics, facts and figures from this social media revolution.

Read through some interesting data and stats about global social media marketing.

“Social media is a lot like sex. Everyone talks about it. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how.”

That’s a quote from our recent Social Media is a Lot Like Sex deck, and we think that sentiment rings particularly true for companies trying to implement a global social media strategy. I mean, at any moment you could be trying to engage with someone who uses a different social network than you’d expect, speaks a different native language than your company’s, or even has cultural nuances of which you’re unaware. Needless to say, there’s a lot of moving parts.

So what’s a global marketer to do? Well, stop guessing for one — instead, use data to help inform your social media strategies! That’s why we’ve collected 62 stats that help paint a picture of how social media works around the world, 20 of which we’re going to highlight in this blog post.

Plus, we’re going to show you how those stats can be boiled down into some insightful global social media strategies that global marketers might want to consider.

I’m a selfish Twitter user. I love scrolling through, letting it alert me to vital news, opinion, and baby mammal GIFs. But, like some 40 percent of all people on Twitter, I prefer consuming tweets to contributing them.